Characters and Rigs

This weekend I started playing with the tools for creating a 3D character. This is weird, I'm a programmer, but I like to be involved in art process sometimes.

In order to make this character I followed the next procedure.


First of all we created the blueprints because a character is an asset quite complicated to make without any guide. To make this blueprints we read the description of the character we previously wrote in the GDD (Game design document). This character must be a kind of caricature. He has long arms like a monkey and he has to be big because this character is a kind of beast. He always solves the problems on the hard way and it's better if he can hit something or someone. As we are not great drawers we asked to my friend Elia Cuenda to draw this blueprints. With this images we started with our color proves.

With this blueprints I generated a 3D model of the body with 3D Max (I prefer to model with Max and animate with Maya). For the head I followed a different procedure. I started with the basic human head on Mudbox and I modified it until I thought it was ready. Once the head was ready I send it to Max again to do a retopology. This  gave me great results and allowed me to cretate the normal maps and oclussion maps in a simple way. For the retopology I discoveedr the graphite tools on Max. They are great and fun to use.

Once the model was finished I made the UV coords. This is a laborious process that takes a lot of time. As I said before I'm not a good drawer and for this reason I started to make the textures with pictures and photographies. For this reason once the UV were ready I modified it to fit the shape of the textures. This is something really hard because you need to modify your textures in order to get something that you can understand on photoshop, but that mantains a texel ratio over the model. I played a lot with photoshop until I got something cool.

And now I want him to move. And with moving comes the tedious problem of the 3D part...Rigging and skinning. On the original model we used Cat to generate the skelleton. It was easy. We used only two fingers because this model will be seen from a large distance and it has no sense to model  more.

The skinning process is the hard part. I tried with the capsules to adjunt every area but due to the mesh toppology I had a lot of problems with the neck. So I changed  to vertex mode and adjusted with the weight tool.
One last step. Tell CAT that we want Chucky walking and adjust several curves in order to make its steps heavier. This was the result.

But the funny ends here. We decided that all animations will be done in Maya because skining and animation process is quite easy and I didn't check the scale of the model before I made the skin. Also we need that Chucky rides a bike so...maybe we have to much work until he enters the game.